January 28th, 2015 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Dot Hill has long made storage controllers and systems that were capable of handling both traditional disk and SSD volumes. In November they released a major software update though that amongst other things, optimizes their 4004 controller architecture for hybrid configuration. The 4004 is what's inside the Dot Hill AssuredSAN Ultra48 that we reviewed previously, and turning our HDD configuration into a hybrid just means swapping out HDDs for SSDs. The SSDs can be used as a real time tiering configuration or in a cache mode as an extension of the storage controller cache.

January 27th, 2015 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

EMC's VNX5200 storage controller is the entry point for the company's VNX2 offerings and features block storage with optional file and unified storage functionality. The VNX5200 can manage up to 125x 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch SAS and NL-SAS hard drives and SSDs and is built with EMC's MCx multicore architecture. Kevin O'Brien, Director of the StorageReview Enterprise Test Lab, recently traveled to EMC's data center in Hopkinton, MA for some hands-on time and benchmarks of the VNX5200.

January 26th, 2015 by Lyle Smith

The Toshiba MG04SCA Series of enterprise hard drives leverage a 3.5" form factor, 7,200 RPM spindle and SAS interface in capacities up to 5TB. The drive is capable of throughput up to 205MB/s in the 5TB capacity, which uses five 1TB platters (the prior generation used 800GB/platter). The MG04SCA is also the first enterprise hard drive to ship with 4K native sector lengths, though an AF model is available as well. Toshiba also offers what they call "persistent write cache technology" with the drives, which delivers gains in performance and data reliability.

January 21st, 2015 by Lyle Smith

The SanDisk CloudSpeed Eco launched in March of last year as part of the consolidation and rebranding of their line of SATA enterprise SSDs. The enterprise SATA family includes four models covering the gamut of use case needs. For its part, the CloudSpeed Eco is designed for the popular entry-enterprise category, which comprises mostly read-intensive workloads in scenarios including boot drive duty, web serving, media streaming, and performance read tier in hyperscale data centers. The CloudSpeed Eco comes in capacities of up to 960GB with cMLC NAND and supports a drive write per day over the three-year warrantied life.

January 17th, 2015 by Lyle Smith

The Synology RackStation RS3614xs+ is a performance-driven network attached storage solution with 12 front-mounted hot-swappable 3.5-inch bays that is designed for businesses that require reliability and high uptime as well as a comprehensive set of business applications. Synology indicates that their RS3614xs+ simplifies data management, optimizes virtualization environments, and can rapidly expand storage capacity without having to worry about a time-consuming setup and maintenance.

January 2nd, 2015 by Lyle Smith

The Toshiba HG6 is a dual entry-enterprise and enterprise client SSD that is designed for high-performance, high reliability, and power efficiency for OEM systems. Available in capacities up to 512GB, the Toshiba HG6 SSD is offered in the five standard form factors (2.5" 7.0mm, 2.5" 9.5mm, mSATA, M.2 2280-D2 Double-Sided, and M.2 2280-S2 Single-Sided), allowing the diverse line of SSDs to satisfy a plethora of use cases.

December 19th, 2014 by Josh Linden

The Dell PowerEdge 13G R530 is a 2U rack server engineered for midrange and virtualized workloads with two sockets for Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors. The R530 is built with Intel’s Grantly architecture and a Wellsburg C610 chipset that supports 12 DDR4 DIMM slots, 2 PCIe 2.0 slots, and 3 PCIe 3.0 slots. With a single chassis layout option that features 3.5-inch drive bays, the R530 is oriented towards use cases that require storage density over storage performance.

December 19th, 2014 by Josh Linden

The PowerEdge R430 packs Dell’s 13th generation PowerEdge compute platform into a 2-socket short-depth 1U rack server. The 13G R430 is built on Intel’s Grantly platform with a Wellsburg C610 chipset that utilizes Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors with 12 DDR4 DIMM slots. The R430 has four chassis options with up to 10 2.5-inch hard drives and two PCIe Gen3 slots, making it attractive for deploying additional compute power to a rack that is tight on space or for use as the foundation for a PowerEdge deployment that is expected to scale over time.

December 18th, 2014 by Tucker Mindrum

The ThinkServer SA120 by Lenovo is a 12-bay 2U JBOD that features an expansion capability to support four 2.5" drives (in addition to the 12 3.5" drives) with an optional SSD expansion pack for up to 51.2TB of storage. This positions the ThinkServer SA120 in a unique spot in the market, giving buyers the best of both worlds with flash cache plus high-capacity storage in a single compact storage shelf.

December 16th, 2014 by Lyle Smith

The WD Sentinel DX4200 Storage Server is the company's latest effort to bring SMBs storage that's both easy to use and simple to manage. The DX4200 builds on the DX4000 that was released about three years ago. Key updates include a modern OS, Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Workgroup, and a more powerful Intel Atom processor. Inside the 4-bay enclosure are WD Se enterprise SSDs that are designed for high-end NAS work and can offer capacities up to 16TB raw. WD has also pulled over a unique feature from their micro-server line, offering a dedicated boot drive for the system which makes going from box to production faster, allows for safer system updates down the road (by reducing data disruptions), and storage capacity isn't lost to the OS. WD also offers a variety of warranty and support options to make sure SMBs worry less about their storage and more about business operations.